Much light has been shed on important features of teaching and learning by Alasdair MacIntyre's writings. Yet there are experiences that are crucial to teaching and learning that are unaddressed in MacIntyre's arguments; experiences that reveal education as a distinctive kind of practice. This paper examines one kind of such experience: an experience I call 'being pulled up short'. Drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gerald L. Bruns, I analyse an example of teaching King Lear to argue that being pulled up short is a unique experience of disorientation that cannot be taught merely by pedagogical skill, including the modern tools and approaches provided by constructivist learning theory and meta-cognition. The paper concludes by identifying challenges that being pulled up short poses for the education of disposition, and for the aims and activities of teaching.

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Man who lives in a world of hazards is compelled to seek security.-John Dewey, The Quest for CertaintyAs John Dewey recognized, humans have always longed for security in an uncertain universe and have sought to achieve command over nature in order that they might better be insulated against disaster and, perhaps, also be able to improve their lot. Myths, legends, and superstitions often reflect these deepseated human urges; so do fairy tales. Consider the wonderful story by the brothers Grimm of Rumpelstiltskin, the gnome who had gained enough control over nature to be able to spin straw into gold. The unfortunate young maiden to whom Rumpelstiltskin gave assistance had to pay a terrible price for his help. In the end, thankfully, the maiden learned Rumpelstiltskin's name. She thereby not only avoided Rumpelstiltskin's price but also ended up gaining control over him.Today humanity is more advanced: Primitive faith in magic has been replaced, in many cases, by belief in the findings of empirical research. Indeed, we can go further: Some modern educational researchers seem to be intellectual descendants of Rumpelstiltskin, claiming to possess the capacity to spin the dross of hard data into educational gold using meta-analysis and other statistical techniques. But no less than the maiden in the fairy tale, one needs to stop and ask if the price they exact is too high. In the case of the lengthy and painstaking work of Wang, Haertel, and Walberg (WHW, 1993a), we shall argue that the answer is yes.We shall pursue two different lines of thought; we are grateful to WHW for providing such a rich setting in which to cash out these important issues. First, although the issues are complex, in the final analysis the atomistic or reductionistic methodology used by WHW in their work (and which is so popular in many educational research circles) does not do justice to the educational phenomena that they wish to illuminate; while pursuing this general theme, we will make a number of points about the relation of theory and evidence in science, and we will touch on certain crucial assumptions that are made about educational research. Second, WHW have too simple a view of the relation between educational research and educational practice. But before turning to these, it may be worthwhile to summarize their general line of thought. 305at NANYANG TECH UNIV LIBRARY on June 9, 2015 http://rer.aera.net Downloaded from

Educational scholars concur that research preparation courses should engage doctoral students with methodological differences and epistemological controversies. Mary Metz and Nancy Lesko recently published articles describing how courses guided by this aim engender self-doubt for students. Neither scholar is entirely convinced that self-doubt is educationally productive. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of Bildung, Deborah Kerdeman reframes the view of self-doubt that Metz and Lesko assume and shows why self-doubt can be transformative. Gadamer's argument regarding self-doubt challenges constructivist views of agency and also demonstrates that engaging with difference is necessary for new understanding to emerge through conversation. Kerdeman concludes by considering why engaging in Bildung helps doctoral students become good educational researchers and why cultivating Bildung should therefore be an aim of research preparation courses that engage students with methodological differences and epistemological controversies.[O]nly those teachers who can freely question their own prejudgments, and who have the capacity to imagine the possible, can help students develop the ability to judge and the confidence to think for themselves. That we criticize ourselves and that others criticize us is the authentic breath of life for every true academic and researcher. This is not always comfortable. I do not propose that to be criticized is comfortable. Every person is then a little distressed and doubts himself more than he usually does. This is true for teachers as well as for learners -and to have chosen this is our lot. -Hans-Georg Gadamer 1